So now the shift for the next week or two is on puppetry. I picked up a job modifying a dragon puppet that I seem to be in charge of. A few years back we built a 40 foot, seven headed dragon for a pageant at church. It's very cool and it take ten people to operate. On June 19th The New Church celebrates it's founding with a pageant depicting Revelations 20. So we have a seven headed dragon for that. I am modifying two more heads to accommodate having water spew out of the mouths of three of the heads. One was done two years ago and another two are now being done. So I'm busy with that for the time being.
In regard to the Gnomes, I am beginning to produce more books and I anticipate that I will release the first book (of seven), certainly to the industry, but possibly to the public. I will likely use that book to raise the funds to continue with the remaining artwork for the rest of the books. I did not want to release any of the books until the full collection was completed, but I may have no choice. If luck turns in our direction, then maybe I can acquire the funding for the artwork without having to release any of the series. I certainly think it would be far better to release the full collection at the same time, right up. But we'll see what happens. For now I am looking into putting a printing press into the shop so we can publish on demand and bind the books as we need them. Besides the application to publishing the books, this would help for other materials as well. I have printing capabilities, but we need to bring the cost of printing down to a marketable level. So far that is not the case. Even though I was hot on the trail of publishing the books, when it became clear that I needed to publish the sheet music before we could advance, I shifted over to that. Now I need to look at all that again.
I am also considering developing a marketing strategy for internal activities pertinent to the industry and I believe that implementing that before releasing the product is most likely the best approach, but in addition to that I am building a Raid Array for Final Cut Studio and with that considering working with Poser to create some basic CG animations. I have been rearranging the shop space with the intention of getting the green screen up and running, so these are all considerations. Truthfully however, I'd rather cut a good deal that would buy me some time to work on shop issues, while seeing the production activities advance. But that another issue.
That's all for now. AG
OK, here's an old model I made years ago. I was trying to conceptualize the basic idea so I made little Gnomes out of clay and the set for The Squirrel's Nest scene. The model sets are made out of paper mache and what you see here represents the upper branches of Constable Warren's Tree, where the Gnomes hold their town meetings. This was made before the shape of the show was really formed and before we created the personalities of the characters. You can see from the artwork provided elsewhere herein, that the characters have become very distinct. These Gnomes were rather generic and we even crated a doll of this style of Gnome. But this design was rejected because everything was too androgynous. I thought it would be nice to include a photo and this is the only one I have available at the moment.
